Showtime's hit historical drama The Borgias will be brought to an end when the current third season finishes later this month. When the current season comes to an end on June 16, the Jeremy Irons-staring show will be wrapped up for good, with show creator Neil Jordan revealing that a story to tie up the series has been written.

According to Deadline, who broke the story, Jordan had previously planned on having a four-season run of the show, however he and Irons agreed during the filming of the final episode of the current season that things had been tied up nicely and that there was not real need to continue the series. Jordan told Deadline that after the filming of an important scene in the now final episode of the show, Irons turned to him and said; “this feels like the end of something, that the family has come to an end.”

Whilst working on a potential script for what would be the fourth and final season of the show, Jordan went on to explain that he was running out of ideas and finding it near-impossible to come up with an additional 10 episode for the papal drama. ”As a compromise, I proposed to finish the arc of all the characters with a two-hour movie,” Jordan went on to say, but although the idea was commissioned by Showtime and a script had been written by Jordan, it turned out that the overall cost of shooting a feature-length episode would be too much and thus the idea was scraped.

Clara and Eleanor are a mother and daughter, born two centuries ago as vampires and surviving only on the blood of mortal beings. They escape to an English seaside town and are taken into an abandoned guesthouse by the owner, Noel. While Clara takes on a job as a lady of the night who drains the blood from her clients, Eleanor has dreams of being a writer, chronicling her life as a vampire in pages that she usually scatters in the wind. It isn't long before they are discovered, both by the mortal people of the town and by The Brotherhood; an all-male vampire organisation that seek to find and kill Clara. Eleanor meets a boy called Frank, who she develops feelings for and spills the secrets of her world to, angering her mother who fears for their safety. As knowledge of their existence spreads further and further, they are forced to confront their past and the deadly secrets that come with it.

Neil Jordan knows movies are a form of art. While much of his work carries a distinctive artistic style, his involving 1986 drama Mona Lisa even carries the title of the famous painting of a dark, serene, mysterious woman with a slight grin on her face -- the Mona Lisa.

Mona Lisa shares much in common with that painting. The film contains a female character who is serene, dark, and mysterious. It doesn't take a genius, however, to comprehend that the leading actress here is a lot sexier than the woman in the painting.

Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) just keeps going down down down. This time, it's a "thriller" about a loony who controls the dreams of Bening, making her loony as well. The loony (I'll kill the "suspense"--it's Downey) also kills her daughter and husband, you know, just for kicks. And there's apples apples apples galore! You know, for symbolism. I think.

Years ago on David Spade's "Hollywood Minute" segment on Saturday Night Live, the comedian offered his take on The Crying Game's big secret. "Sssh," he said. "It's overrated." Sarcasm aside, I have to agree with Spade.

Is it a good secret? Sure. Is it one of the most memorable in cinema's last 15 years? Possibly. But one good surprise/twist does not make a great movie, and there's very little else in director/writer Neil Jordan's drama to deserve such lavish wide-eyed acclaim. It's a solid, well-acted character study. That's it, I'm afraid.

Intermission, a gritty ensemble comedy about a bunch of gritty Irish folk, bears some resemblance to late-nineties indie crimedies like Trainspotting, Go, and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and fans of those movies should certainly check this one out--it's practically made for those "if you liked [that], check out [this]" shelves at the video store.

What Intermission resembles just as handily, though, is an Irish Love Actually, which is to say it's like Love Actually with a lot more drinking and violence. This is unlikely to placate anyone who truly hated Love Actually and, as such, would require something on the order of a soccer riot to feel fully cleansed. But if you (like me) merely thought a few of those charmingly stammering Englishmen could use a good deck, Intermission is the punch-throwing, rock-chucking romantic comedy for you.

The heist movie, or robbery movie, has worn out its welcome in recent years. There's nothing more infuriating than feeling as though you're five steps ahead of the film, with no pleasure found in connecting the dots. The Good Thief doesn't really have anything new to add to the genre besides a sense of style. It's as though visionary filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves) read the script, accepted it as a simplistic morality tale of an aging crook, and pumped up the sumptuous visuals, the seeps-into-your-bones soundtrack of global music, and the iconic figure of Nick Nolte. Those elements single handedly give The Good Thief a sense of purpose when it would otherwise have none, and the stylistic flourishes -- instead of feeling like they're present for their own sake -- add depth to what could have been another boring movie about doublecrossing.

Whenever the plot of the movie feels rote (the thieves assemble their team, plan the robbery, carry out the robbery, and doublecross each other a couple of times along the way) the arresting images carry the day. Cinematographer Chris Menges (who recently shot another existential mystery, The Pledge) finds the right pace: active yet unhurried, kinetic yet wistful. With shadows that turn into lush purples, greens, blues, and all gradations of black, The Good Thief is intoxicating. Indeed, it might be Jordan's most visually stimulating movie, and one has to wonder if the cookie cutter nature of the script set him free to imagine new visual possibilities. Lovers of the visual image will find much to appreciate; plot-driven viewers will find very little to hang their hat on.

The time between 1916 and the 1920s saw the worst of a revolt that caused the creation the IRA and heightened the fight for independence between Ireland and the crown in London. At the head of this fight, like it or not, was Michael Collins, a demagogue/saboteur/freedom fighter that lived as a hero and died a martyr.

Read it once again -- this is not Braveheart. Braveheart took place something like 600 years earlier, and just a stone's throw across the North Channel, in Scotland.

Neil Jordan doesn't make bad movies. Even if the story isn't spectacular (The Good Thief), the visuals are always stunning and the acting is consistently so striking that you're never bored by what you see. There are times that cultural patterns remain unclear (The Crying Game) and you'll feel lost in the muddle of figuring out exactly what's going on, but the trick is to just watch without dissecting. You're guaranteed to walk out stimulated by the events that occurred.

The same holds true for his latest, Breakfast on Pluto, starring the ever-impressive chameleon Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) as an orphaned transvestite in Ireland during the 1960s and '70s. After seeing brief passages of his playful struggle to maintain his identity from one boarding school to the next in working class suburbia, we're swept up in the journey of Patrick, a.k.a. "Kitten," as he heads to the wilds of London in search of the mother who left him behind.